story1267 wrote:
I continue to have daytime sleepiness (sleepy rides to work - it's better than it was pre-CPAP but not ideal).
I continue to have daytime fatigue (I have things I really want to get done, but struggle to do them) (I'd love, love to take naps but I don't take them).
My sleep quality is hard to describe. I don't feel like I'm waking up as often as I did pre-CPAP but I'm still not feeling refreshed.
So things have improved but not to where you expected or wanted them to be.
You know that is not unusual at all. That happened to me as well. We all want to be the recipient of the "cpap miracle" that we read about people having but in reality that miracle is relatively rare and happens to people who have no other issues to mess with how they feel except sleep apnea. Remember the cpap therapy can only fix sleep apnea issues and it can't fix bad sleep if bad sleep is caused by something other than sleep apnea and there's a big long list of things that can mess with our sleep besides sleep apnea.
I don't know how much of an impact the brintellix may have on your unwanted symptoms or how much the condition that you are taking it for may be a part of your unwanted symptoms. From what little I read about brintellix it didn't seem to have as many of the unwanted side effects (like messing with sleep, or drowsiness, or insomnia) as the meds you used to take as those are so well known I didn't even have to look them up. It's something to be aware of and talk with your doctor about.
Meds for depression often cause the very same symptoms as sleep apnea in terms of daytime drowsiness and even insomnia...of course the depression can also cause those same symptoms.
So this is where the other part of the speech comes in...other health conditions that might impact how we feel or sleep....and that includes mental health.
The machine can only do so much to improve things but it can't always fix everything that we want it to fix.
No matter how much we wish all our issues can be blamed on OSA it doesn't always work out that way.
So what do we do? We continue to use the cpap because it does help...maybe not as much as we want but it does help...and work on anything and everything we can in terms of meds, stress, life in general to hopefully have continued improvement. Sometimes we do have to "give it time" but use that time to investigate other potential culprits (like meds side effects) or other health issues and try to fix what we can fix to maybe make things even better.
You may need more sleep than you are getting which I know is much easier said than done.
I know that if I don't get around 8 hours of good decent sleep I don't feel so great the next day.
The nights where I get less than 7 hours I pretty much will expect to have a my butt drag the next day and want to take a nap.
In terms of your report...it looks really good so nothing on it screams out "fix me" which is both good and bad ...good because on paper it's working but bad because you don't feel as good as it looks and there's nothing that we see than needs fixing to maybe help you feel better.
The only thing I might offer is to consider trying either a much tighter pressure range or even cpap mode to see if the pressure changes happening in auto mode are a disruptive factor to your sleep quality.
Some people sleep quite well through some massive pressure changes (that would be me) but others find that the least little pressure changes can impact sleep quality and it's something to think about because I suspect you are already probably tending to be hyper vigilant because of the baby's issues and you sleep with one eye open anyway. I don't know if removing the wide range of pressures will help or not but it sure wouldn't hurt to try and would be worth looking at.
Don't ask me what pressure though...I haven't thought that far ahead and haven't seen enough reports. It was a bit of a struggle to compose all this here. We can talk about that later if you wish to investigate trying a limited range or cpap mode.
I may have to RISE but I refuse to SHINE.
